An Efficient Caching Mechanism for Video-on-Demand Service over Peer-to-Peer Network

In contrast to peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, video-on-demand (VoD) streaming technology over P2P network is still awaiting breakthrough. The demands on scalability, playback deadlines for all peer nodes and playback continuity under a dynamic peer join/leave situation in a lossy P2P network are the major challenges for deploying a P2P based VoD system. In this paper an efficient weight-based caching mechanism, including a prefetching algorithm and a cache replacement algorithm, is proposed to satisfy these needs for P2P based VoD systems. The simulation results are presented to show that by engaging our proposed mechanism better quality-of-service could be achieved at an acceptable gossip cost comparing to another two existing relatively better solutions.